Priscilla Kapel:
our Founder
Priscilla grew up in Bronxville, New York, in the days when all food was organic, “ice boxes” had real chunks of ice in them, she was awakened by hundreds of noisy robins on the lawn, and the telephone operator would ask you for just four numbers, and then she would plug you in to your friend’s phone.
Priscilla and her mother used to go to the zoo to sketch the animals, and we made clay sculptures of them. This was the beginning of her career as a sculptor. Her father was an inventor, and he enjoyed sharing his theories about the space-time continuum and speculating about the universe. Those conversations developed, eventually, into my open-ended spiritual curiosity.
After high school at Concord Academy, in Concord, Massachusetts, she studied sculpture, ceramics and chemistry at Ohio State University, and did my graduate work at Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The next year Priscilla married John Kapel, a design student at Cranbrook, and she became part of his Slovenian family and community.
They moved from New York to California with their two-year old Vida, their one-year old Evan, and Ben was born a few months later. As they grew up she was able to do some terracotta sculpture, and the kids did theirs too.
By chance Priscilla came across a dear Cuban friend she hadn’t seen since they were teenagers, Ernesto Gonzales, who was giving a show of his welded sculpture in a garden in Palo Alto. As soon as Priscilla walked into the yard, he put down his torch, lifted up his mask, and joyously called out “Ah Ha! The Rumba!” They talked about the good times in art school in New York, and their rhumba dancing, and then he said “You need to be a welder. Sit down. Here is the torch. I will teach you.” He was an exacting teacher. Precision. Details.
From then on, steel and bronze became her new medium.
In the late sixties, when their daughter Vida went to live in a commune, Priscilla felt that this new view of society was a valid concept to explore, so she spent the summer in a commune near Mendocino, and experienced a life-style that was a welcome contrast to the suburban social consensus.
After she got home, John and Priscilla developed differences. They eventually separated, and she moved from Woodside to Palo Alto. Priscilla received her massage certification, studied bodywork with Michael Murphy at the Massage Center, and became a massage therapist. After finishing Prescott College, Evan moved into Priscilla’s little cottage. He talked about the new concepts in the alternative health field, and at the same time Vida introduced her to the work of Dr. Wilhelm Reich.
During that time, Priscilla studied Touch for Health with Dr. John Thie, and this became the basis for the vibrational communication and healing work that was later to evolve.
When Evan went to Santa Cruz, Ben moved in. With muscle testing, he and Priscilla were able to verify some of Dr. Reich’s experiments about orgone energy, and she became part of the Orgone Energy Workshop, in Berkeley.
My next major connection was in Clinical Ecology, with Dr. Philpott and Dr. Mandel. Their work opened up Priscilla’s ability to resolve amino acid utilization disorders that often form the basis for difficult health issues. She audited a class in Endocrinology at U.C. Berkeley while Ben was there studying biophysics, and these diverse resources became the foundation for the Bioenergy Balancing Center®.
In 1981 Priscilla left her massage practice at the Massage Center, and started the Balancing Center with a few very creative people. As they were developing their unique healthcare modality, they all went to the Lazaris seminars, and his teaching became integrated into the spiritual awareness that has become part of our work with clients. At the same time, they found that the muscle-testing skills from Touch for Health were able to reveal not only quite complex biochemical processes, but could clarify unresolved emotional issues.
Building on the foundation
Our beloved founder Priscilla Kapel passed away on November 26, 2022 peacefully at her home in Arizona. She moved into the vicinity of Sedona, AZ after she retired in the fall of 2021. Her work is still continuing by a team of former co-practitioners, graduates from the Bioenergy Balancing Training.
As Priscilla’s original work continues to unfold, the current team of practitioners keep discovering new and surprising ways that these modalities are connected. Click here a current list of Bioenergy Balancing Center practitioners.